The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (7 page)

Chapter 7

The Dialectic of Negation

Here are some quotes that reveal what early Zionist ideologists thought of their brothers, the Diaspora Jews, those for whom they were developing a nationalist project based on a philosophy of racial ethnic identity:

‘The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline.’ (
Our Shomer ‘Weltanschauung’
,
Hashomer Hatzair, December 1936, p.26. As cited by Lenni Brenner
³⁶
)

‘The fact is undeniable that the Jews, collectively, are unhealthy and neurotic. Those professional Jews who, wounded to the quick, indignantly deny this truth are the greatest enemies of their race, for they thereby lead them to search for false solutions, or at most palliatives.’
(Ben Frommer, The Significance of a Jewish State, Jewish Call, Shanghai, May 1935, p.10. As cited by Lenni Brenner
³⁷
)

‘The enterprising spirit of the Jew is irrepressible. He refuses to remain a proletarian. He will grab at the first opportunity to advance to a higher rung in the social ladder.’
(The Economic Development of the Jewish People, Ber Borochov, 1916
³⁸
)

‘The emancipated Jew is insecure in his relations with his fellow-beings, timid with strangers, suspicious even toward the secret feeling of his friends. His best powers are exhausted
in the suppression, or at least in the difficult concealment of his own real character. For he fears that this character might be recognised as Jewish, and he has never the satisfaction of showing himself as he is, in all his thoughts and sentiments. He becomes an inner cripple, and externally unreal, and thereby always ridiculous and hateful to all higher-feeling men, as is everything that is unreal. All the better Jews in Western Europe groan under this, or seek for alleviation. They no longer possess the belief which gives the patience necessary to bear sufferings, because it sees in them the will of a punishing but not loving God.’
(Address at the First Zionist Congress, Max Nordau, 1897
³⁹
)

Early Zionist ideologists were pretty outspoken when it came to the ‘Diaspora’ Jewry. Ber Borochov eloquently diagnosed the inherent Jewish non-proletarian tendencies. Max Nordau didn’t spare words when confronting the intrinsic post-emancipated Jewish social incompetence. In the eyes of Hashomer Hatzair, the Diaspora Jew is nothing but a caricature and, for Ben Frommer, it is nothing less than neurosis we are dealing with. Yet, they were optimistic, they somehow believed that a ‘new beginning’ would cure the emancipated Jew of what seemed to some as a ‘disgraceful’ fate. They believed in a global Jewish ‘homecoming’, they were convinced that such an endeavour would heal the Jews of their inherent symptoms.

In an article published just after the first Zionist Congress (1897) Ahad Ha’Am, the most prominent Jewish polemist at the time, wrote ‘…the Congress meant this: that in order to escape from all these troubles [the Jewish anti-social symptoms as described by Nordau] it is necessary to establish a Jewish State.’
⁴⁰

Being inspired by 19th century ideologies such as Nationalism, Marxism, Early Romanticism, Darwinism and Life Philosophy (
Leben Philosophie
), early Zionists preached for the emerging of the bond between the Jew and ‘his’ soil. Naively, they believed that the love of farming, agriculture and nature would turn the emancipated Jew into an ordinary, civilized human being. Early Zionists predicted that Zionism would create a new, authentic form of Jewish-ness, in which Jews would be entitled to love themselves for who they are rather than who they claim to be. While the socialists amongst them were talking about a new commitment to working class ideology (Berl Kazanelson, Borochov, A.D. Gordon), those on the right wing (Jabotinsky, Frommer) dreamed of a master race that would emerge and rule the land.

Both Right and Left truly believed that, due to their homecoming, Jews would be able to replace their ‘traditional traits’ with aspirations towards sameness. They genuinely believed that Zionism would turn Jews into ‘people like all people’. Failing to understand that the premise was categorically flawed for ‘other people’ do not wish to be ‘like other people’. In other words, as long as Jews insisted on being like ‘all people’ they would always fail to be themselves.

Just as early Zionists had never tried to disguise the extent of their prophetic dream, they also didn’t make any efforts to conceal their contempt towards their ‘Diaspora’ Jewish brothers. In their emerging fantasy of national awakening, Jews would divorce from greed and money seeking as well as cosmopolitan tendencies. In their vision, Zion was there to transform the Jew into an ordinary organic human being. The move to Zion was there to fill the chasm created by emancipation. The settlement in Zion was there to give birth to a new man. A Jew who looks at himself with pride, a Jew who fills Jewish-ness with meaning. A Jew who is defined by positive qualities rather than by mere negation.

Emancipated, Assimilated and Zionist

When it comes to secular Jews, things get complicated. While
observant Jews can easily list a few measurable qualities they identify with, for instance they follow Judaism, they observe Jewish laws, they follow the Talmud, they follow Kosher dietary restrictions, etc., emancipated secular Jews have very little to offer in terms of positive characteristics to identify with. Once you ask a secular Jew what makes him into a Jew you may hear the following: ‘I am not a Christian nor am I a Muslim.’ OK then, but what is it that makes you into a Jew in particular? He may say, ‘I am not just American, French or British. I am somehow different.’ In fact, the so-called emancipated, assimilated or secular Jews would find it hard to list any particular positive quality that may identify them as Jews. Emancipated Jews are identified by negation - they are defined by the many things they are not.

This is exactly where Zionism interfered. It was there to set the Jews up in a project that aimed towards an authentic identification. Zionism was there to let the Jew think in terms of ‘belonging’. Within the Zionist phantasmic reality, the generations of home-comers were there to declare: ‘We are the new Jews, we are Israelis, we are human beings like all other human beings, we live on our land, the land of our forefathers. We speak Hebrew, the language of our ancestors, we eat the fruit and vegetables that we ourselves farmed on our soil.’

Zionism has failed for various reasons. Zionism could never have prevailed. It has been entangled with an endless list of sins from day one. Yet, as much as Zionism quickly established itself as a criminal practice, some of its criticism of the emancipated Diaspora Jewish identity is worth looking into. At the end of the day, the so-called emancipated Diaspora Jew is still defined by negation and this fact alone has very many grave implications.

The Politics of Negation

In order to grasp what Jewish Diaspora identity means in the
21st century, we’d better try to find out whether the notion of emancipated Jewish identity has changed at all since the early Zionists exposed its problematic character more than a century ago. How, for instance, does a ‘Jewish Marxist’ refer to his Jewishness.

During my years in Europe I have come across groups of people who call themselves ‘Jews for Peace’, ‘Jews for Justice in Palestine’, ‘Jews Against Zionism’, ‘Jews for this’ and ‘Jews for that’. I have recently heard about ‘Jews for Boycott of Israeli Goods’. Occasionally I end up asking myself what stands at the core of this ethnocentric, separatist, peace-loving endeavour. I may as well admit that though I have come across many German peace activists, I have never come across an ‘Aryan Palestinian Solidarity’, ‘Aryan for Peace’ group or even Caucasian Anti-War campaigners. It is somehow Jews and only Jews who engage in racially-orientated or ethno-centric peace and solidarity campaigning.

Borochov and Nordau provided us with a possible answer. In the seeking of a ‘political identity’, the emancipated Jew ends up succumbing to the dialectic of negation. His or her political identity is defined by what he or she isn’t rather than by who he or she is. United as a group, they aren’t Germans, they aren’t British, they aren’t Aryans, they aren’t Muslims, they aren’t just ordinary proletarians or even boring peace-lovers, they aren’t just common, working class people. They are Jews because they aren’t anything else. At a first glance it seems as if nothing is wrong in being defined by negation. Yet, a deeper critical glance into the notion of negation may reveal some of the devastating aspects of this form of emancipated dialectic.

Ethical thinking may be the first victim of the dialectic of negation. In order to think or judge ethically, genuine, authentic, organic thinking is of the essence. Emmanuel Kant’s categorical imperative (‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law’)
identifies ethical thinking with an orientation that sets one on a self-search for a ‘universal’ insight. Clearly, such a process involves thorough self-reflection. Negation, on the other hand, requires the opposite. It involves scouting and searching into others’ praxis. Again, rather than understanding who you are, one invests some effort in differentiating oneself from the other and from the universal. Rather than listening to one’s conscience and engage in an authentic ethical judgment, the negating subject sets his or her relationships with his or her surrounding environment, based on pragmatic and practical decision-making and exchange. At most, one may present a pretence of ethical thinking, but no more than that.

The Israelis take a special pride in the IDF’s ‘code of ethics’ (a set of principles that define ‘The IDF Spirit: Values and Basic Rules’). Israelis claim that the IDF is the only army in the world to possess an ‘ethical code’. Asa Kasher, the Israeli philosopher behind the ethical code, must have skipped Kant’s contribution to ethics. For Kant, ethics is a matter of judgment rather than an internalisation of a given moral ‘code’ or rules. The ethical being, according to Kant, is distinguished by his or her capacity to judge ethically. The ethical subject is engaged in a constant dynamic ethical exercise rather than a symbolic acceptance of a given rule.

Similarly, many political institutions are also fascinated by the ‘1948 Human Rights Declaration’. They seem to believe that it conveys an absolute ‘universal ethical standard’ that transcends beyond time and place. In fact, this is not necessarily the case. The 1948 declaration is a mere representation of a set of universal judgments made at a given time and place (10 December 1948, Paris) by a group of people. For the obvious reasons, it fails to provide answers to some different questions that arise as we proceed in time and live through some dramatic changes.

As opposed to the Kantian vision of ethical judgements being
distinguished by openness, the Declaration is interpreted by some as a set of moral rules. As such, it impedes an authentic moral exercise. It is not surprising, therefore, that Neocon think-tanks, moral interventionists, Israeli lobbies and supporters of the war against Islam ground their argument in the declaration. It conveys an image of an ethical argument.

Looking at Israeli
Hasbara
(propaganda), as well as at Neocon politics around the world and especially in America and the UK, reveals the bitter truth of the matter. Neocons and
Hasbara
always present a seemingly ‘ethical’ argument. They employ what looks like a moral excuse in order to introduce a pretext for a war. As we know, the so-called ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ is also the one that has locked Palestine’s vast populations behind walls and barbed wire for decades. Similarly, people like Wolfowitz and Perle dragged America and Britain into a futile criminal war in Iraq in the name of ‘moral interventionism’, ‘democracy’ and ‘liberation’. Clearly the Palestinians and the Iraqis are paying a heavy price as victims of the politics of negation, politics that convey a deceitful image of righteousness by means of cloning. But the Palestinians and the Iraqis are not alone.

The Westerner subject who is stained with the crime of genocide is also a victim of the Western shift towards politics of negation. Rather than defining ourselves by who we are, we get accustomed to our politicians defining us by whom we suppose to hate: once it was the ‘Nazi’, then the ‘Red’, then it was the ‘axis of evil’ and now it is the ‘Islamofascists’. The list is obviously open to changes.

More frightening is the fact that people who succumb to the dialectic of negation cannot engage in peace-making and reconciliation. The reason is simple: the notion of peace, reconciliation and harmony entails a collapse of the politics of negation. From the point of view of negation, reconciliation means elimination. Loving your neighbour may lead towards an identity loss. Needless to say that in the last centuries, millions of European
and American Jews have chosen peace and total assimilation. They have divorced their Jewish identity and disappeared into the masses.

However, the fact that emancipated Jewish identity is defined by negation may also help us to realise why it is that emancipated Jews are so often part of political campaigns and revolutionary movements: those who are defined by negation are always against something. It could be the bourgeoisie, capitalism, colonialism, Palestinians, Iraq, Iran, Islam, the Goyim, human rights abuse, historic revisionism, Zionism and so forth. Seemingly, the journey between ‘dialectic of negation’ and ‘politics of hate’ is rather short.